Today’s randomly-chosen word is finding from Awakening the Heroes Within by Carol S. Pearson. I continue to be intrigued with the words that are coming each day. I open the book to a random page and point to a word without looking. Twice, I’ve pointed to a blank page but otherwise, these are the words I’m getting. The words thus far have been nameless, girlhood, alone, perceived, whimsical, beginnings, and now finding. Fascinating bits of randomness given the nature of my art and life.

Today’s rule for the art piece is: No frame. The frame has been dissolved by the rain falling in my lovely city today and has been replaced by openness, possibility, and poetry.

rain falling softly

like a lover whispering

“stay right here with me”

Today’s quote is actually a stanza from a poem that I was reading this morning. The poem is “Ocean Lady” from The Poetry of Pablo Neruda. I chose it because it stopped me. Each word is like a little found treasure at the beach that I keep turning over in my heart to see the way time has etched itself on the surface.

Remember: you carry the bird’s heart
in its cage: the debate of wings and song,
so many violins, soaring and flashing.
Gather, gather for me, the sounds and jewels,
until wrapped in air and fire, we voyage
accompanied by the congress of pure harmonies
to morning’s waterfall of shimmering ingots.
And may our love palpitate like a fish in the cold.

Perhaps this catches in my heart because it speaks to the tension I feel related to domestication and my heart’s deep longing for freedom and an embrace of the wild. The way we have been domesticated doesn’t work for me. I don’t have tidy hair or any sort of desire to appear respectable or professional to others. I embrace authenticity and admire it in others. I don’t aspire to live in the woods but I do have Neruda’s “debate of wings and song” happening at present.

Yesterday, I was introduced to the writing of Jeriah Bowser and his Wildist perspective. I found his piece Weeds in the Holy Garden: A Wildest Review of the Laudato Si’ to echo many of my own current thoughts about the very real problems we face on this planet and the way that transcendent belief systems are serving to calcify these problems. My desire to find harmony with life is often thwarted by the degree to which our world becomes increasingly controlled and carved up. As Mr. Bowser says, “…there is the daily reality of resistance to domestication.”

There’s a teaching story about how a mouse in a cage can wiggle through the bars if it stops eating the cheese. The question is: What will it find on the other side of the bars?

Today’s randomly chosen word, beginnings, comes from the achingly beautiful book, Counting by 7s by Holly Goldberg Sloan. I got the book for my daughter and ended up reading it. I’m so glad I did. It’s the kind of story that takes your heart out, squeezes it hard, heals it, and hands it back to you. I cannot more highly recommend it. On the cover of the book, it says, “If you’re lost, you might need to swim against the tide.” Wow, can I relate to that sentiment! The past many years of being a single mother, going to school, and making my way through the thicket of relationships, healing from childhood trauma, and losing my mother have made me feel very lost at times. Clarity comes in fits and spurts and often through art and writing.

The art today is 3-D. Except for the chalk, everything is three dimensional so I can see the shadow. After viewing the gorgeous Blood Moon Lunar Eclipse a couple of weeks ago, I have been pondering the nature of shadow and light a bit more both within and without. Today’s quote, from Leonardo da Vinci speaks to this:

The beginnings and ends of shadow lie between the light and darkness and may be infinitely diminished and infinitely increased. Shadow is the means by which bodies display their form. The forms of bodies could not be understood in detail but for shadow.

That quote echoes what I have felt for a long time about shadow–long before I ever read Carl Jung‘s work–that we are animated by shadow. You learn that when you sketch. You feel it in your body when you allow it. Despite this knowing, I still carry so much judgement at times, especially towards myself. Judgement and the fears that come along with it can totally paralyze me in moving forwards at times so I’ve been mindfully moving through it. One of the ways I’ve done that is listening to Tara Brach‘s podcasts of late. She’s a wonderful teacher with a calm presence that I appreciate. The most recent one I listened to is Letting Go of Judgement in which she quotes Rainier Marie Rilke from Letters to a Young Poet:

“Perhaps all the dragons in our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us act, just once, with beauty and courage. Perhaps everything that frightens us is, in its deepest essence, something helpless that wants our love.”

Finding the helpless parts of myself that want love is taking a lot of courage and fortitude. Listening to Ms. Brach’s encouragement to be present with what she calls “aversive judgement” and to look for the layers of vulnerability underneath it makes me realize that this layer is a conditioned response that has been trying to help me. She says, “It’s not our fault that we’re judging. It’s really deep in our evolutionary history to sense that something is wrong.” She calls it a “survival fear” that “mobilizes us for war”. This idea that we create an “other” that we need to defend against as a layer of programming–of armor–that we can mindfully learn to take off really resonates for me. I long to love the parts of myself and life that have been hidden underneath that armor.

The armor is too heavy and makes it hard to breathe and swim. I’ve been living with the intention to swim against that evolutionary tide and into a place that is more loving, a place that comes from higher mind. It takes consciousness. It takes an awareness of life as both three dimensional (shadow. immanence.) and ethereal (light. transcendence.) In his notebooks, da Vinci says, “The painter who draws merely by practice and by eye, without any reason, is like a mirror which copies every thing placed in front of it without being conscious of their existence.” So, too, with life.

Today’s word comes from the gorgeous book, Dreaming My Animal Selves by Hélène Cardona which, incidentally I never would have found without the magic of the internet. I’m so glad I did because it’s a glorious book of poetry. The word I chose randomly is whimsical! Yay!

I am not sure whimsy ever got squeezed out of me in my youth. I’m fortunate to have children and friends who help keep this alive in my heart. Something I love about my city is the whimsical things that are often waiting to be found. I remember being acquainted with the Toy-Box Trio at the Seattle Art Museum and fell just a little in love with their sound. It’s common to happen upon little art installations, fairy houses, or stacked rocks in local parks. It’s lovely to live in a world where such joy waits for me stumble upon it.

Today’s quote comes from Yoko Ono. It’s more of a directive but I was drawn to it because of the word whimsical. The book it comes from, Acorn, is filled with delightful prompts that can only enrich one’s life.

Wishing Tree at Carkeek Park

Make a wish. Write it down on a piece of paper.

Fold it and tie it around a branch of a Wish Tree.

Ask your friends to do the same.

Keep wishing until the branches are covered with wishes.

Finally, I can’t think of whimsy without thinking of my fabulous friend, Rob D’Arc who makes glorious puppets for the stage as well as puppets you can take home. You can also find him at the Pike Place Market selling his puppets. The holidays are coming…

Each day during the month of October, I’m creating an ephemeral bricolage art piece. I choose a random word from a book on my shelf by opening a page in the book and pointing to a word without looking. I also started creating a rule for each piece because I like constraints.

Today’s rule was paper. This is an easy one because I’ve had a thing for paper since I was a very young girl. My transitional object at age 5 and for many years after, as I went back and forth over the Cascade Mountain pass from my mother’s house to visit my father was a large manila envelope. I put various bits of paper, old checkbooks from my parents, and whatever other paper objects I could find inside and played with them for hours even before I knew how to write words. My brother called it my Paper Friend. In many ways, paper continues to be one of my better friends. Reliable. Receptive. Beautiful. Goes everywhere with me.

Today’s word is “perceived” from Joseph Cambell’s work The Hero with a Thousand Faces. I appreciate receiving this word today as how things are perceived has been on my mind of late. Most especially, I’ve been pondering judgment and how constant it is both in the outer world and in my inner landscape. Judging myself. Judging others. Making assumptions based on judgements. So much judging taints my perception of the beauty of life and yet it’s so hard to rid myself of. It isn’t that compassion isn’t right there hoping to smooth out the wrinkles if I want to choose it. It’s just hard to choose it sometimes. Being in the moment helps. Remembering that we’re all doing the best we can helps. Re-membering. That’s what I’m doing with these bricolage pieces. Remembering what’s lovely about the world and myself with shells, words, ink, and bits of paper.

Speaking of lovely paper, did you know that the Book of Kells is available for viewing online? Well, now you do. It’s beautiful. I noticed that you can also buy a scanned copy for your own library. What a world we live in! The film Secret of Kells from the fabulous Flatiron Film Company that features this book is a stunning work of art. We watch it at least once a year.

“La Loba sings over the bones she has gathered. To sing means to use the soul-voice. It means to say on the breath the truth of one’s power and one’s need, to breathe soul over the thing that is ailing or in need of restoration…That is singing over the bones.”

Today’s bricolage comes from the beach at Carkeek Park which has been my go-to place for contemplation for 16 years. There is little that I can’t process emotionally or mentally when I’m near the water at that particular beach. My only rule for this piece was that the objects had to come from beach.

The (randomly chosen) word girlhood comes from the lovely children’s book, Hope is a Girl Selling Fruit by Amrita Das. An excerpt from the book that I can so relate to is:

CHILDHOOD. Mine was far my idyllic, though not untypical. I was responsible for a great deal when I was very small, and my girlhood passed even before I knew it.

So where did that leave my story? I struggled with myself, talked things over with my friends and my teacher but all I had were ideas, nothing concrete.

This is often something that happens with girls–the responsibilities we have in our families keep us from being given the opportunity to explore our interests. We are less encouraged to do so and our aspirations and ideas given less merit. Despite receiving more college and graduate degrees, women are still paid less than men. I’m taking a poetry class with poet Douglas Kearney at present and wrote this poem this morning. It occurs to me as I write this how it reflects my thoughts about the value of the Feminine–the indwelling nature of life. Concepts of ownership and value continue to be part of our cultural conversations and are certainly very alive in my own consciousness.

weighted leathered hexagon

beauty enhanced with

bruised flesh

(how many hands have touched it?)

protruding navel like an

axis mundi

labyrinthine inner nature concealed

(sticky sweetness contained)

Illumined with flickering

candlelight

explored with eyes and fingertips

turning it over in my warm hands to reveal

a barcode sticker pressed tight

against red skin

as if we can assign human value to Nature’s bounty

(Persephone understood)

As I will continue to do in this series, I will end with a quote. This, from Nobel Peace Prize winner Desmond Tutu:

“We were made to enjoy music, to enjoy beautiful sunsets,
to enjoy looking at the billows of the sea and to be thrilled
with a rose that is bedecked with dew…
Human beings are actually created for the transcendent,
for the sublime, for the beautiful, for the truthful…
and all of us are given the task of trying to make this world
a little more hospitable to these beautiful things.”

I found this quote in an online Jungian group this morning. His words underscore my intention for the Bricolage Project–to notice and celebrate the beauty and truth in life and to allow my creative meanderings a place to expand and my ideas to become more concrete.